1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of document management. In many professional environments, people have to manage documents they work with in the sense of drafting, reading, reviewing, revising, archiving, etc. In many situations, many people manage their documents manually and in physical form, in other words: by putting printed or written paper documents on their desk or in their drawers. However, when the number of documents becomes larger and larger, management of the documents becomes increasingly more difficult. One way of coping with this problem is digitizing all documents and managing the digital documents in a computer system. However, people happen to prefer working with documents in physical form, i.e., printed on paper, and they also do not like to change their often long-time habits in order to adapt to the operation of automated document management systems. Moreover, working with both hard-copy and digital documents requires frequent conversions of one type to the other and vice versa. In practice, such conversions take time and are often annoying for the users.
In particular, an embodiment of the present invention relates to a method for handling documents in a digital document processing system. Furthermore, an embodiment of the present invention relates to a digital document processing system for implementing the method and a computer program product for causing a processor to perform the method.
2. Description of Background Art
A method and system as described above is, e.g. known from EP 1 229 724. This document describes a document processing system with a plurality of document processing devices, such as printers, scanners and/or copiers. The devices are connected to a control system through a network. The system further includes workstations, such as PCs. The users of the workstations can submit print jobs to a printer in the system. Such a job is then sent to the control system through the network. The control system includes a storage for storing digital documents, e.g. documents to be printed by or documents scanned by the document processing devices. Each of the digital documents is associated with one user of the plurality of workstations (hereinafter referred to as the “owner”). For example, a print job is linked to the user who submitted the print job. A scanning job is associated to a user who has identified himself as such at the scanner console. The control system uses a processor for managing the digital documents. In this system, print jobs are normally not printed immediately, but only stored as a digital document. A user can then select a digital document locally at the console of any of the document processing devices and give a PRINT command for the selected digital document. A user can obtain information on the status of a digital document, namely, “printed” or “not printed,” via the display on the console of any of the document processing devices. Furthermore, digital documents generated in a scanning operation in a device can be uploaded to a user's workstation.
The known system may thus be used to generate digital documents that can be uploaded, stored and managed in a user's workstation. However, the system is limited to scanned-in document files. Therefore, a more general approach for all kinds of digital documents is not possible. Moreover, a user must pass through several process steps in order to login to the system, select a file and upload the file to his workstation.